If you ever have any doubt about Microsoft's dedication to becoming a tier-1 Cloud provider, all you have to do is read back through the history of Azure updates and releases. Microsoft Azure is steadily steaming ahead.
Scott Guthrie, the newly crowned king of the Cloud and Enterprise group at Microsoft, took to his well-worn blog on Monday to outline some recent updates to Microsoft Azure. You'd think that Scott's new role would keep him too busy to continue his onslaught of frequent posts on Azure updates, but it's actually a good sign to see he's still taking the time to promote Azure services.
Among the updates announced on Monday, five of those exited preview and were made publicly available. Those include:
- Virtual Network - DynamicRouting VPN Gateways and Point-to-Site VPN
- Autoscale - dynamically scale cloud server capacity on Azure automatically as needed
- Storage - Read Access Geo Redundant Storage
- Active Directory Premium - guaranteed SLA and no limit on directory size, group-based access assignment, self-service password reset, delegated group management, multi-factor authentication, customized branding, reporting, alerting, and analytics
- Scheduler service - run jobs on simple or complex recurring schedules that can invoke HTTP/S endpoints or post messages to storage queues
In addition to the pieces released to general availability, new features have been added for Azure Web Sites, Virtual Machines (supports Chef and Puppet), and Notifications Hubs (adds Kindle Fire support), along with two new Preview release products: Azure Automation and Mobile Services.
Read through Scott's entire post to get an in-depth explanation of the new releases:
